A 50-YEAR DREAM:
COUNCIL MUST KEEP BALBOA PARK PLAN ALIVE

2/1/2010 San Diego , Ca. Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama currently has automobiles allowed to drive through and park in it, however Mayor Jerry Sanders would like to have it paved and closed as a pedestrian only plaza. Scene from the center of the plaza Photo Sean M. Haffey/San Diego Union-Tribune.

2/1/2010 San Diego , Ca. Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama currently has automobiles allowed to drive through and park in it, however Mayor Jerry Sanders would like to have it paved and closed as a pedestrian only plaza. Scene from the center of the plaza Photo Sean M. Haffey/San Diego Union-Tribune.

The path ahead has never been more uncertain for San Diego’s crown jewel playground and cultural center, Balboa Park. But there is still hope.

Long-held dreams to turn the park’s central plazas into a pedestrian wonderland were all but turned to nightmare by last week’s devastating court ruling rejecting City Hall’s approval of the $45 million plan to beautify the heart of the park, and the subsequent withdrawal from the project by Irwin Jacobs, the plan’s philanthropic financier.

Mayor Bob Filner, seemingly clueless, in one moment proposed (sarcastically, we think) to simply set out a half-dozen orange traffic cones to block vehicles from the park’s Plaza de California and Plaza de Panama. In the next moment, he proposed (seriously, we think) to revive an old and discarded plan to build a new parking structure on the perimeter of the park. But there is no site selected for such a structure, no engineering plan to build it and no money to pay for it. To suggest as he did in a televised interview that it could all be achieved in just 22 months, in time for the Jan. 1, 2015, launch of the yearlong celebration of the park’s 1915 international exposition, is folly. The Jacobs plan was already on an extremely tight timeline – and it did have the City Council’s approval, detailed engineering plans, and the money.

The half-baked plan of the Save Our Heritage Organisation, the group that successfully challenged the Jacobs project in court, would eliminate parking and beautify the plazas while still allowing thousands of vehicles a day to flow through. But there is no money for that either, and there is intense opposition from the museums and other park institutions, which did support the Jacobs plan.

Jacobs, who had already spent $8 million of his own money and persevered through two years of sometimes pointed personal attacks along the way, finally threw up his arms in exasperation the day after the judge issued his final ruling last Monday.

To top it all off, the effort to stage the centennial celebration of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition was shut down, at least temporarily, by an unexplained cutoff in city funding to the private committee planning the celebration, perhaps just a bureaucratic mishap. Presumably, that mess will be resolved quickly.

And, thankfully, the Jacobs project is not quite dead.

Supporters of his plan have a plausible idea to overcome the legal obstacle. The City Council could simply exempt the project from the city ordinance that the judge said had been violated. That’s what the council should have done in the first place, as the judge himself noted, and all would be well today.

We hope that City Council President Todd Gloria, whose district includes the park and who has been a leading champion of the Jacobs plan, will pursue that idea along with City Attorney Jan Goldsmith and the council. The process would take three months to finalize, could be vetoed by Filner and there is no firm assurance at this point that even if the council could override a mayoral veto that Jacobs could be lured back into the project along with his promised $30 million. But it’s worth a try.